Dietary Adherence Is The Key To Effective Dieting

Dietary adherence is a strange one. While most people will say it is just a matter of discipline, this isn’t the full story. Believe us, we are the biggest fans of discipline around, but discipline is really only a small part of the story when it comes to dietary success. There are many barriers to your ability to adhere to your diet, including social, behavioural, cultural, environmental and even self-imposed barriers. While we likely won’t cover all the barriers one might encounter in this piece, hopefully delving a little deeper into the reasoning being “adherence” will allow you better address the “why” behind you adhering to your diet or not adhering.

But before we go any further talking about dietary adherence, it is important to actually ensure that your diet is actually effectively set up. Nobody wants t

Firstly, adherence to training is the easy part for most. They go to the gym, have a killer workout. Do their cardio, and hit some personal bests. They LOVE the gym. The act of going to the gym isn’t a chore but rather it is a pleasure, and while sure there are days when they would rather be doing something else or they don’t have a great session, but they still love the gym. They have no problem getting the work done in the gym, and their adherence to their gym program is near 100%.

But then that pesky diet, that’s where the trouble starts. Dietary adherence is far “harder” than adherence to training. While the barriers to the diet are generally the same barriers to training, we tend to find a way to get the gym work done and accept that “nobody’s perfect” when it comes to dieting.

Well, there is a reason for this. You see evolution has selected for humans to like food. Shocking I know. We have evolved to enjoy the thing that keeps us alive. We have also evolved to enjoy the thing that we used to do to actually secure the food, moving. So we like moving (going to the gym) and we like food. This is great except in the context of modern life where calories are abundant and the movement you do is dictated by you, and not your desire to hunt food down due to the hunger you feel in your stomach.

So we have literally been bred to enjoy eating and enjoy training, this makes training easy and dieting hard.

So to some extent, you can blame your biology, but that’s not the whole story.

You see there are multiple factors that make adherence to your plan harder, and understanding these a little bit more will help you increase your adherence. Because let’s face it, we are all the same species, so the evolutionary reasoning behind poor dietary adherence just doesn’t cut it. There are people out there that are able to adhere to their diet, so if they can do it why can’t we all?

 

Dietary Adherence and Education

This is a big reason why people find it hard to be adherent to their diets. They just aren’t aware of what needs to be done and prioritised to see the results they desire. They don’t understand their calorie and macronutrient requirements, and if they do, they aren’t aware that some of their choices aren’t conducive to their goals. They choose high-calorie density foods, with low satiety and wonder why their diets make them so hungry. Or they eat “good” food but don’t account for the caloric value of it. More education almost always increases adherence.

This applies especially to those that are undertaking a new way of eating. If you are changing your diet to new or modified foods, then gaining a better education of how to structure your diet will obviously help you become more adherent to your diet. More education is always a good thing.

Everyone has dietary perceptions and preferences, and these can sometimes be the limiting factor in your adherence. Education to some extent will help here, but it won’t always. If you have been thought your whole life that carbs are bad, it is going to take a lot of education to teach you they aren’t. If you don’t like the taste of vegetables you are going to have to spend the time educating yourself on the different benefits of vegetables and the different kinds of vegetables available.

 

Dietary Adherence and Motivation

People aren’t actually motivated long-term. They have whims, not desires. They like the idea of achieving a certain body composition or goal, but they aren’t actually motivated by the process. They want the end result, but they don’t want to really have to deal with the process involved in getting there. Or perhaps they aren’t actually motivated to achieve the goal themselves. Someone else has chosen the goal for them. They have been told by their doctor they need to lose weight, or they think that person they fancy will like them more if they achieve a certain body composition.

This is very common, and it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Assessing your motivations is an important part of actually working towards a goal, and very often you will find that your motivation is quite low because you don’t actually want the goal. So always swimming against the current and struggling with low motivation could just be an indication that you don’t actually care about the end goal, or it is just a lower priority goal to other goals (such as enjoying meals out with friends/family).

 

Dietary Adherence and Behavioural Skills

They lack the behavioural skills required to be adherent. This is a big one, that is a little harder to admit. People still act like children and just pretend to be adults. They make poor dietary choices, purely because they can. Not because they need to, they don’t have a sweets deficiency or a physiological need to eat extra calories, but because there is no authority figure holding them to the task they literally feel they can and should do what they want. They haven’t actually developed adult behaviours, they are basically just big children.

If you can’t control your behaviours, or you lack the skills required to assess your own behaviours in an objective manner, then this should become your main focus.

 

Dietary Adherence and Support Networks

A huge barrier to people’s adherence to their diet, especially if it is a new dietary practice, is their support network. If you don’t have an understanding support network, or if your support network is actually actively working against you achieving your goals then good luck trying to stay adherent. If your significant other isn’t on board with your new way of eating, and constantly gives out about it, adherence will obviously be low. If you still live at home and your parents cook your food, and they don’t respect your new way of eating, good look being adherent. If all your friends want to do is go out on the drink and eat takeaways, good luck trying to be adherent to your diet.

Finding a group of like-minded people with similar goals to you is essential to increasing your adherence. You may be lucky to have access to like-minded people in your local area, but very often that isn’t possible. Fortunately, you can find like-minded people on the internet and social media very easily these days.

 

Dietary Adherence and Social and Cultural Norms

Modern society isn’t exactly set up to encourage adherence to a healthy lifestyle. There are fast food places on every corner, and shops are filled with all kinds of sweets and treats. While it is getting better, with much more focus on foods that are actually calorie and macronutrient friendly (like protein bars) it still isn’t socially/culturally acceptable to be looking after your health. People who are trying to actively eat a better diet are often looked down upon and almost scorned. Think of how “normal” it is to say you are going out for a few drinks, and how getting out of your mind on alcohol or openly smoking, is perfectly acceptable in society. But heaven forbid you are seen with a protein shake. That’s just not right, looking after your health is bad!!! Although we all experience this social/cultural barrier to dietary adherence, some do feel it more. Especially if you are from a minority culture or you are the only one in your small village that cares about their health and diet in general, you will obviously experience it more. Obviously, this goes the other way, and being fat-shamed can lead you to feel socially isolated and unable to adhere to your diet.

 

Dietary Adherence and Environment

If you don’t live near shops that sell good wholesome food, or foods that allow you easily fit your macronutrients then you are always going to struggle to be adherent to your diet. You can’t just magic up lean meats if your local shops only sell the fattier cuts of meat. You can’t magic up fresh vegetables if your shops only sell canned vegetables. Your environment does play a factor in your ability to adhere.

It isn’t just about the availability of “good” foods, but also in the availability of “bad” foods. If there is a dominoes beside your house and you grew up loving pizza, you are always going to struggle while you live there. If you work over a bakery, and the smell of bread makes you crave it, you are going to struggle. If your workplace gives out free sugary snacks, or the people in work bring in tins of biscuits/chocolate, you are more likely to struggle.

Your environment will obviously influence your ability to adhere hugely.

Now delving into all that obviously helps a little bit, as you can already begin to see where you may be falling down on your dietary and where you could probably improve, but the next section will help you put everything into better context.

 

Addressing Your Dietary Adherence.

To address your dietary adherence, or rather your lack of dietary adherence we must consider two things, the extrinsic aspects, and the intrinsic aspects.

Extrinsic

Is your poor dietary adherence due to poor diet set-up?
Are you trying to eat calories that are woefully inadequate for you?
Are you eating high-calorie, low-satiety foods to hit your calorie/macronutrient targets?
Are you filling up on vegetables?
Are you eating enough protein?
Why do you keep exposing yourself to environments/people that reduce your dietary adherence?

 

Intrinsic

What is actually motivating you?
Why do you have a low self-worth, and why do you think improving your body composition will address this?
Why do you lack discipline, and is this an issue throughout your whole life or is it specific to your diet?
Why do certain foods and environments “trigger” poor dietary adherence for you?

 

Do you actually understand the why behind what you are doing?

Generally, there is a reason you wish to eat healthily, what is it? Why is that reason not enough to overcome all the other barriers that potentially block your progress? Do you actually want something as badly as you say you want it, or again is it just the end goal something you desire, rather than the process of achieving that?

To some extent, it is mental toughness that will improve adherence, but you can only be mentally tough once you have actually spent time self-reflecting. If you don’t know your reason why, you will always just be moved by the currents. Any whim will be enough to push off track with your goals, because your goals aren’t actually defined. You want something vaguely but haven’t actually fleshed out what you want. Building the habit of being adherent is a skill like everything else, and the more you do it the more you will actually stick to it. But unless you understand the why behind your goals, then adherence will always be a stab in the dark.

So spend the time figuring out your actual why and your adherence will improve dramatically.

 

The Burden of Poor Adherence

If all the above doesn’t convince you that adherence is the most important factor, then just remember that it is actually a far bigger burden to NOT adhere to your diet than to adhere to it. Let me explain…

Stick to the plan. Stick to the plan. Stick to the plan. STICK TO THE PLAN!

No, seriously, you need to stick to the plan. If you are trying to lose some body fat, you are going to make life very hard for yourself by having poor adherence. You see, what a lot of dieters do is get themselves into the dieting mindset, a mindset of restriction, and they do really well 5-6 days per week. They stick to their caloric targets, but, on those other 1-2 days, they overeat by a bit, have a “cheat meal” or go out drinking.

The result? They end up around maintenance again. They lose no weight. But, they have to deal with a much greater mental burden than someone who is just eating at maintenance as part of their everyday life. They have the expectation of progress, a feeling of failure and an ongoing mindset of restriction. That is very TOUGH to deal with.

It really is making your life far more difficult than it needs to be. Imagine if you just stuck to the plan 7 days per week? You would be at your goal in a couple of weeks/months and get on with your life again. This is the thing a lot of people dieting don’t see: IT IS NOT FOREVER. It does not NEED to be something you see yourself doing for the rest of your life. The reality is that, if you actually stuck to the plan and hit your goal, you could then resume eating at maintenance, happily, long into the future.

So, please, for your own sake, stop sabotaging your own efforts. It is the equivalent of writing 18,000 words of a 20,000 word essay and then crossing it out/tearing it up at the end of the week.

That is quite the mental battle.

So whenever discussing diets, or engaging in one yourself, you must factor in the biggest part of the puzzle, adherence.